The North Memorial Ward occupied a gentle rise of dry gravel-earth in the center of Fen Hollow, sheltered from the marsh winds by a vast, circular grove of weeping willows whose pale yellow leaves were drifting down onto the green turf like golden coins.
Six years ago, this place had been an armed stronghold of desperate pushback. Consensual bone-frames—the anonymous skeletons of flood victims who had offered their bones to hold the levees—had marched the outer edge day and night under the command of Captain Sile Rook, while mercenary hit-squads sent by Darven Holt probed the palisades with fire arrows and poison darts.
Now, the palisades were gone.
The Memorial Ward was an open, calm park of green turf and ancient willows. He was surrounded by a low dry-stone wall of white limestone. Orderly rows of small, box-shaped slate stelae—four thousand, one hundred and twenty in total—stood beneath the trees, each stone neatly engraved with a name, a date, and a parish mark. Between the rows, clean crushed-shell paths wound peacefully through beds of wild mint, white clover, and blue marsh irises.
The consensual bone-frames were no longer walking. Under the solemn religious accord carried out during the King’s Bench settlement, every single skeleton had been laid to rest in deep, consecrated graves beneath the turf, their labor permanently discharged, their long vigilance ended.
